Boyish girls and girlish boys in 20th century children's literature

[SaltPorridge]

George in "The Famous Five", Enid Blyton

Peter in Malcolm Saville's books set in Shropshire

Nancy and Peggy in Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome

Petrova in "Ballet Shoes", Noel Streatfield

Please add more/ discuss/ disagree etc.

Tolkien's mother became a Catholic. She died young, and left JRR and his brother in the care of a priest, to be brought up as Catholics.
Tolkien mostly writes about men - there are very few women. Eowyn is very much a feminine women who rebels against the restrictions placed on her, disguising herself asa man so she can go into battle.

Though in my imagination, since Tolkien told us outsiders can't tell the difference between male and female Dwarves, and they never talk about it, considering it private, Gimli is female.

Terry Pratchett took that idea and ran with it, creating Cheery Littlebottom (the Guards’ forensic scientist) who rebels against her society’s expectations re ‘gender’ by feminising her appearance. (I gather there’s some tv adaptation which woefully misunderstands and messes this up).
Of course in his children’s/YA books he didn’t shy away from having a female, not remotely ‘boyish’ lead - I hope boys don’t deprive themselves of Tiffany Aching.

I prefer my she-Gimli to Cheery, much as I love Pratchett.

I've never seen Nancy and Peggy from Swallows and Amazons as "boyish", not like George from famous five.

Yeah, they changed their names, but to ones just aa female, and it was because they identified as Pirates, not as boys.

And yes, they railed against having to wear dresses, but only because they were impractical, rather than because they were a girlish thing to wear.

Obviously they didn't meet the housewife stereotype of Susan, who had no character other than doing the cooking and cleaning and fretting about the younger ones. But I don't see them as any more "boyish" than Titty or Dorothea.

I don't really like the idea that being strong willed and practical are male traits, and that any girl that shows them is "boyish"

And on "Titty" being problematic, Tits as a euphemism for breasts is an Americanism, and didn't really come to the UK until the 2nd world war. By which point all but one of the S&A books had already been written. Would have been a bit pointless for Ransome to change her name just for the last book.

I agree that Nancy and Peggy wouldn’t have thought of themselves as boyish, more that they could do all the stuff that boys were doing and not conform to great-auntish stereotypes of how girls should behave. It’s actually refreshing that there are so many girls like this in pre 21st century children’s books. Even if some of them end up
being ‘ladylike’ like poor old Katy.

Susan is First Mate of Swallow. Sailing a dinghy on Coniston is hardly wimpish anyway (have you tried? when you were 12?) but in WDMTGTS, the Swallows steer a yacht across the North Sea. Yes she does fret about failing to keep her little siblings out of mortal danger! I would say she is a strong character.

I liked Susan (Walker) much more on re-reading the books as an adult. I think I took her for granted when I read the books as a child, much as most children take their mothers for granted. There's a very telling line in one of the books set in the Lakes (might be Swallowdale) where AR mentions how tired Susan always is the day after they all travel north by train (or it might be that she has a headache), because she spends the entire journey looking after everyone else, getting them to the station on time, keeping tabs on the packed lunches and luggage, getting everyone ready to change trains, and so on. As a veteran of innumerable similar trips, I empathise with this now!

As Captain Flint and probably several other adults acknowledge several times, Susan is the reason the grown ups are happy to let the children go off on their adventures. Quite right too. From my scant knowledge of military history, I believe it's widely agreed that an army really does march on its stomach. Napoleon credited his successes to good quartermastering and provisioning of this troops. Susan is the S&A Quartermaster, and an excellent sailor too.

I bet she'd have been promoted to some very senior role in the Wrens during WW2.

There's also a line in Pigeon Post, where the children are wrongly suspected of starting a fire, when one of the other children sees Susan's expression and thinks, 'Nobody should ever make Susan look like that.'

She was expected to be responsible and took it very much to heart.

Yes! How could I have forgotten that. Susan Pevensey is not a rounded character who jumps off the page. Susan Walker is.

A little bit unfair on Susan P @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g , I think. She's as rounded as anyone else in Lewis's books. None of them are fantastically round, not even Shasta or Aravis. She doesn't jump off the page because she doesn't jump at all. She's focused on practicalities and not on the "higher things" that Lewis values and writes about more.

While I can sail, and have done since I was a kid, I'd happily say that all of the S&A kids aside from the D's are probably better sailors than me, and that Susan as Mate is probably one of the stronger sailors.

She also has a lot of other skills useful to the group as explorers, campfire making, provisioning, cooking etc.

My problem is more with the way Ransome never really lets us get to know Susan. We spend a lot of time in John, Titty, Roger, Nancy, Dick and Dorothea's heads, but I never feel we properly get to know Susan because the only time we ever get a chapter from her point of view is when she's worrying that the younger ones are missing, or that the group are doing something they shouldn't be, or that she'll have failed her parents because she hasn't looked after them enough.

I'd agree that WDMTGTS is her best book, but even then her main role in the story is to impress upon the reader how serious the situation is.

"and cross-dressing is never a thing that girls find attractive."

...Speak for yourself! Sad that men's clothing is SO rigidly stereotyped that pretty much anything except for shirt/t-shirt and (boring) trousers is deemed "cross"-dressing. If only there were not such a rigid barrier for them to cross... Women in the West are about a hundred years ahead of men in that way.

"Girlish" boys being badly let down in this thread. And the overwhelming takeaway from this thread, and the literature to which it alludes, seems to be that being "boyish" is desirable, while being "girlish" or stereotypically "feminine" is to be avoided for both sexes... The more things change... Disappointing.

Also, in The Truth, it turns out that the dwarf who runs the printing press is female.

She is Martha to Lucy's Mary. I always thought it monstrously unfair that she was excluded from Heaven because she liked make-up and fashion, which showed she had abandoned Aslan. She also talks as if Narnia was all pretend - Lewis makes the reader assume that this is because Susan is an apostate, but it is just as likely her way of dealing with something she knows is a) true and b) impossible to talk about to the people she meets as she grows up without appearing to be insane. She alone of the Pevenseys moves into the world - a deep sin in Lewis's eyes (not sure God/Aslan would see it that way, after all he sees the world as 'good' - Genesis 1).
Lewis also makes Peter in particular quite unpleasantly judgemental about his sister, not at all in keeping with Christian practice.

You're obviously welcome to interpret what Tolkien said as you choose, but I'm fairly sure that when he repeatedly referred to "Gimli son of Glóin" he knew what he was doing ...

Tolkien's works are rather male-dominated, but at least he put some strong female characters in them, like Eowyn and Galadriel (and Shelob?!).

Men's clothing didn't used to be so stereotyped and until c.1800 men in Europe (with the money to do it) dressed flamboyantly - other cultures still do this. But I am thinking of men who wear stereotypical women's clothing e.g. the TiM I saw yesterday (will never see 40 again) in a pinafore dress! My late DH - beard and long hair - wore kaftans and frilled shirts, big floppy hats, long robes etc on a daily basis. I do not consider that cross-dressing, however.

Entirely in keeping with much Christian practice, but not with the ideal...but yes, I agree.

If you think Susan had "no character other than doing the cooking and cleaning and fretting about the younger ones" you should read, or re-read, We didn't mean to go to sea.

Sadly, being judgemental does seem to be a thing about some Christians. Not all, however. I doubt Jesus would have condemned Susan. He might get quite narky with the Peter who appears at the end of 'The Last Battle' though.

Off topic a bit, but one of the moments in. Secret Water shows Titty temporarily in charge of her even younger sister, and thus no longer one of "the little ones".

And it's nearly a disaster, in true Titty fashion, but I liked the fact that the kids grew with the books.

He also knew what he was doing when he made it very clear that Dwarves did not permit members of other races know anything about what sex they were. Meaning that words like 'son' can't be regarded as gendered.

Don't get me going on Shelob, all that huge pale belly, horrible hairy legs, foul smell stuff makes me very self-conscious.

Re: definitely non-boyish but firmly feminist girls, did anyone else read Geraldine Symons' Pansy and Atalanta books, written in the 70s with an Edwardian setting? They give some good social history background and, in Miss Rivers and Miss Bridges, a suffragette adventure.

Some have suggested not to read it. I would I could find a copy to not read if I choose!